“Ghost Town” is the story of Keith, a young gay man from Taiwan who moves to Germany but eventually goes back to the hometown and family he vowed never to returned to. He's just been released from prison and there is an ongoing mystery as to the circumstances surrounding his incarceration. It also follows the lives of his siblings and parents who've all experienced big disappointments in life because of the repressive conditions and limited opportunities of their provincial Taiwanese village. The premise of this novel had a lot of potential, but I found the structure of the narrative very jarring with its shifting points of view and time lines that constantly jump back and forth. This meant that it was both repetitious and confusing. There are a lot of characters so it's challenging to keep track of them all. There's also too many plot lines to adequately do justice to the complexity and nuance of the subjects raised including domestic abuse, suicide, mental health issues and public shaming. As such, I found it difficult to feel emotionally invested in this book. It was perhaps too ambitious of the author to try to present such a panoramic account of this family and it might have worked better if he'd focused on a single point of view.
Though Keith seems to be at the heart of the story he's strangely absent for most of the novel as we only get brief glimpses of his life and cryptic clues as to the traumatic events he's experienced. It's only toward the end that he comes to the forefront and by this point the story rushes through an explanation of violent events which could have filled up the entire book. Keith is a writer who has been published and achieved some success. The explicit details about gay life within his work has shocked some people from his native village and further ostracised him. So it's almost paradoxical that there are so few overt gay experiences shown in “Ghost Town”. There's a lack of descriptive power in his cruising and first sexual encounter with T, a man Keith meets and marries in Germany. It's noted how “they caused the little bed to quake” but while having sex Keith also gets a new idea for a novel and bizarrely muses on the sound of termites. Because the events he survives are rushed through they also often lacked plausibility.
The most effective scenes were when all the siblings were reunited. Here the dialogue between them felt authentic because it was often awkward and infused with a deep familiarity for each other's personalities. I liked that the narrative points of view varied between the living and the dead. However, I felt this could have been developed further to add more poignancy and it reverted too frequently to banal statements from the deceased such as “Is it good to be a ghost? I say it's great.” There were interesting side characters such as a gay couple who operated a bookshop and got arrested after a betrayal. As the case with most threads of this novel, their storyline could have been expanded upon more. Overall I think this book tries to contain too much so, in the end, it adds up to too little.
